Concerns over the future of the nonprofit sector due to increasing resource pressures and an economic rationalist political climate in Australia have led to increasing public and private interest in partnerships between nonprofit organisations and the private sector. Two recent examples of the attention to the topic of collaboration in the Australian context demonstrate the salience of this topic at the beginning of the 21st century. Firstly, the Australian Prime Minister has set up an organisation to deal explicitly with the potential and challenge of these nonprofit/for-profit inter-sectoral relationships. Named the Community Business Partnership, this project was set up to recognise, reward, facilitate and promote nonprofit/for-profit relationships. Prime Minister John Howard said of this initiative:
Working in partnership not only has the potential to enrich people's lives but can also deliver tangible results for all Australians. Community and business partnerships are a driver to accomplish better outcomes than any group acting alone could achieve.
(Community Business Partnership Web site, http://www.partnership.zip.com.au, accessed 09/07/01).
A second recent example of academic interest in private/third sector collaboration was evident at a conference hosted by the Australia and New Zealand Society for Third Sector Research (ANZTSR). ANZTSR is the Australia/New Zealand equivalent of the ISTR, the International Society for Third Sector Research. The ANZTSR conference held in December, 2000 focused on ‘Partnership and Activism,’ and papers presented ran the gamut from community development projects through to explorations of Australian philanthropy. The current interest in both political and academic circles in the ways in which business and nonprofit organisations can work together makes this a critical time for a study that focuses on the internal experiences of nonprofit staff who are experiencing threats and opportunities presented by collaborating with the private sector.
The Federal government’s initiative of Community Business Partnership is primarily concerned with promoting the concept of nonprofits working with the private sector. However, the political rhetoric does not take into account possible negative consequences to the nonprofit organisations themselves as a result of collaborating with business. The research reported here addresses that gap by centring itself on the people closest to the issue. That is, the staff working in the nonprofit trying to maintain and secure financial support for their core community-based work. It is important to understand these co-operative arrangements in context and to examine what possible threats and opportunities these alliances might pose for the agency of staff in nonprofits, the organisational capacity of nonprofits and broader issues of social equity.
This research contributes to an understanding of the third sector by concentrating on some of the possible implications—both negative and positive—of these co-operative arrangements from the point of view of those staff members in the nonprofit. Having ascertained that the primary informants for the study would be staff engaged in nonprofit community work in an urban environment in Australia, it was also critical to select the theoretical bases for analysis. This process emanated partly from the researcher’s own experience, and as such is important to include here. As a social worker in a small homeless services organisation in inner-city Chicago several years ago, the researcher had the opportunity to be involved in fundraising and resource development for the organisation. Although at the time she had no label for the cognitive dissonance she and her co-workers experienced, there was a distinct level of discomfort as the organisation was forced to move from full government funding to other financial arrangements. One of these was to solicit support from the private sector, from large corporations to small local businesses.
Anecdotal evidence from her organisation and subsequent immersion in the literature convinced the researcher that she and her colleagues were indeed caught in conflicting ‘thought worlds’ (Dougherty 1992). On the one hand, the team of social workers and employment placement officers were working to empower participants (never ‘clients’) to re-build their lives by taking control. In this part of their jobs, the nonprofit staff modelled self-confidence, proactive behaviour and assertiveness in setting and achieving goals for themselves and the people with whom they worked. On the other hand, when it came to financial support of the organisation (upon which its very survival depended), staff exhibited almost servile behaviour, fawning over potential donors and showing immense gratitude when assistance was proffered.
One of the most striking features of this experience to the researcher at the time was the linguistic difference between the way in which staff interacted with each other and with participants and the shift when attempting to gain financial support from the private sector. It appeared that some connection between the power relations of the two organisations was reflected and reinforced by the language used in the relationship. This observation led to thoughts about whether the interplay of language and power in nonprofit/for-profit relationships could at least partly account for the perceptions of staff in her organisaton several years prior to embarking on the thesis journey. Subsequent informal observation coupled with substantial grounding in existing work led to this idea being at the core of all the work presented here.
An examination of the language and power implications of these alliances will focus on how the staff is affected by power reflected by language and power inherent in language. The ideas of social agency (the extent to which people feel able to act positively on their own behalf), organisational capacity (the ability of an organisation to respond to challenges and develop progressively) and institutional context are three main constructs of the research.
The purpose of this research is to describe,
understand, map and analyse the experiences of nonprofit staff in organisations
that are linked to businesses in a variety of funding relationships. The set of questions that drove this study
were:
1. Does the language used by nonprofit staff and in organisational documentation relating to relationships with for-profits reflect the status of and contribute to the reproduction of the power relationship between the organisations?
1a. What elements of vocabulary, narrative structure and syntax constitute a 'language of inequality' between the private and third sector?
1b. How is this language different in genuine power-sharing relationships?
1c. To what extent is this linguistic space shared across nonprofit organisations engaged in similar relationships with for-profit firms?
1d. How is the structure of that language transmitted throughout the organisation?
2. Do relationships affect the organisational capacity of nonprofit organisations and the social agency of individuals? If so, to what extent can balanced power-sharing arrangements contribute to increased organisational capacity?
3. Does the media aspect of the institutional context of relationships in which nonprofits operate affect the social agency of individuals and the capacity of nonprofits?
3a. To
what extent are staff members in the nonprofit aware of the constraints on them
of this aspect of institutionalism?